Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  Both Americans and the British loved Cody’s much-imitated Wild West entertainment formula, in which modernity and progress (i.e., white civilization) triumphed over the old and backward (i.e., the buffalo and Indians). The presence of actual Indians in his show blunted any criticism. The English had loved Cody and his show as much as the Americans. But how would the French receive it? Cody the gambler and entrepreneur was betting they would love it.

  Although Crawford and Salsbury had arrived months earlier to prepare the arena and campground, a great deal of work remained before the Wild West’s advertised opening performance of May 18, not the least of which was completing grandstands to accommodate fifteen thousand spectators and helping their impresario and orator, Frank Richmond, learn all his speeches in French.

  Nine days after the official opening of the Universal Exposition, Gustave Eiffel was at long last finally ready for business. On May 15, at 11:50, the great engineer’s Tour en Fer de Trois Cents Mètres, still being painted a shimmering bronze red, welcomed the paying masses. It was exactly two years, four months, and one week since Eiffel had broken ground for the foundations. Eiffel himself, fittingly, was the first to sign the official guest book: “Ten minutes to twelve, May 15, 1889,” he wrote. “The tower is opened to the public. At last!” Directly below signed in Sauvestre, the original architect of the tower, with the whimsical “Midi moins neuf, ouf!” From up on the first platform, where three of the four restaurateurs were not ready to serve customers, Eiffel could see thousands already lined up below, waiting patiently to be among the first to ascend the stairway.

  Very possibly those first visitors saw and recognized the modest Gustave Eiffel, like the captain of a ship always on duty. He was no king, no prince, but a man of middling birth who had made the best use of his education and his democratic opportunities to build some of the leading structures of industrial civilization. He had helped his fellow men and become rich and successful in the process. Eiffel had become, as Lockroy had hoped, a living refutation of all monarchical doctrine. The gilded names engraved on the Eiffel Tower’s first-floor frieze were not those of rulers, but French scientists, men whose knowledge had advanced the world. The tower was elegant, powerful, and playful, but its ultimate message was political, in a world where kings and queens still ruled much of the earth.

  Above, on the second platform, Le Figaro had already opened its tiny office with a small staff and a printing press to publish Le Figaro, Édition Spéciale Imprimée dans la Tour Eiffel. On this heady occasion, the first issue was available for sale for fifteen centimes. “We have put together this number,” the Eiffel Tower journalists wrote, “under rather special conditions: in a shack that barely covers our heads, amid carpenters, gas workers, black-smiths, and painters, dizzy from the unaccustomed air, dust, and noise and tired by the climb up 730 steps (36 stories, if you please) because the tower’s elevators are not working yet.” The newspaper staff encouraged all visitors to drop by their aerial office to sign a guest book, as their names would be run in subsequent issues of the paper. The first person to affix his signature was a wealthy Arab in a burnoose named Si-Ali-Mahoui.

  The weather was perfect—clear and cool with gentle spring zephyrs wafting through the tower’s airy structure. Throughout the day a steady line of thousands gaily ascended the stairs, having paid one franc each to reach the first platform. Eiffel’s workers were still rushing about painting and fixing and finishing a thousand and one details. As for Gustave Eiffel, on this inaugural public debut of his magnum opus, he “remained all day, ever active and full of contented zeal. Cheers were given a Mme. Sommer, who was the first lady to touch terra firma above. . . . All the French press came and one or two foreign journalists. Each and all inscribed their names on the Figaro sheet.”

  Only the hardier souls ascending the tower paid yet another franc to press on to the second platform, up another 380 steep spiral steps. There they signed Le Figaro’s book and patronized Monsieur Jacquart’s little stand-up bar. It remained a most galling truth that while one could watch various persons testing the elevators of the Eiffel Tower, they were still not ready for public use. The tower was a marvel, but without the elevator service, no one could ascend to the top, the pinnacle of the whole experience. Le Figaro acknowledged that while there was no fixed date for the opening of the elevators, “it’s not more, we believe, than a matter of five or six days.”

  Eiffel, his daughter, Claire, and his son-in-law, Monsieur Salles, and Monsieur Sauvestre, the tower’s original architect, and his wife all dined at the first platform’s one open eatery, La Brasserie Alsace-Lorraine on that first day. When a boy appeared with the first issue of Le Figaro de la Tour hot off the small press, customers rushed for copies, knowing they would be valuable souvenirs. Eiffel gallantly toasted this printed sign of progress.

  Next to the astonishment of the tower, there were no greater technological marvels at the Exposition than those to be found in the Edison Company’s one-acre exhibit in the vast iron-and-glass Galerie des Machines. William Hammer, directing forty-five assistants, had more than succeeded in showcasing all the Edison inventions, celebrating the still-novel miracle of electricity. It was widely agreed that “what Eiffel is to the externals of this exposition Edison is to the interior. He towers head and shoulders in individual importance over any other man. . . . His exhibits have the place of honor, the largest space given to any one interest.” It took Engineering Magazine fourteen issues to cover them all. An Edison central generating station ran artful displays of thousands of incandescent bulbs of every size, shape, and color, and “fountains of light,” luminous and lovely. Visitors admired numerous variations on the telephone and a telegraph that sent messages back and forth to a little moving train. Here people had a glimpse of a future transformed by technology: safe, easy lights for their homes and workplaces; quick, simple communication via telephones. Of course, only the most affluent could afford such luxuries.

  But the unquestioned technological sensation of the World’s Fair—to Edison’s delight—was his newly perfected talking phonograph. While the machine was certainly capable of playing music, Edison envisioned the phonograph mainly “for business purposes only.” In Paris, for the first time, the device was available to the public, who could not get enough of it. From the opening day, many thousands of fairgoers stood in long, slow lines to hear the recorded human voice—they could choose among fifty different languages—captured on wax cylinders and played back on one of the twenty-five phonographs. When someone’s turn came, he gingerly took the little earbuds attached by a wire to the machine (five per machine), inserted them in his ears, and listened intently. Almost without fail, a look of astonishment soon spread over his face. With so many waiting in line, each listener was limited to three minutes.

  Fair visitors sated with modern machinery or edifying exhibits on chocolate making and champagne escaped Western civilization entirely by drifting over to the “villages” showcasing France’s new colonies. The nearest was the rue du Caire, the Egyptian market street, complete with crumbling minareted mosque and tall whitewashed buildings on each side, each inset with typical beautiful tiles, carved wooden doors, and arched windows. Cheeky young donkey drivers in long blue tunics added real color as they galloped up and down through the bustling outdoor bazaar. In the street’s many little shops, native craftsmen hammered out brass trays, threw pottery, chiseled delicate carvings, or made leather goods, including ornate saddles. And as in any good Oriental souk, rug merchants plied customers with glasses of tea.

  The exotic music of Arab orchestras wafted out from small cafés. Fairgoers tentatively stepped inside to sit at the small tables and revive themselves with tiny cups of strong bitter coffee or dishes of icy sherbet, or even the gummy dessert Turkish delight. Most were astonished in the first days of the fair to discover that these cafés featured female Egyptian dancers. The danse du ventre, or belly dancing, quickly became one of the fair’s undisputed sensations. “A girl in half-nu
de dress,” reported the New York Times reporter, “revealing a good deal of ugliness under closely-drawn tulle, rises and walks about, moving, first, her bosom, and then her hips in true Eastern fashion. . . . The girls dance in bare feet outrageously painted red and yellow.”

  The Egyptian women performed on the half hour throughout the afternoon and evening, in “half a dozen grimy cafés,” reported William Brownell, thirty-eight, a veteran of the New York World and now an editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons. He took a jaundiced view of this particular craze, describing the performers as “so absolutely mechanical and listless . . . that, to a reflecting person, it was the audience that was really the spectacle.” To his dismay, far too many American women were shamelessly present in those hole-in-the-wall cafés, avidly staring at the half-naked contortions of their foreign sisters. “The [American women] almost forgot decorum in crowding for a better view, in leaning over the backs of chairs, in concentrated, absorbed attention.”

  The bustling crowds along the fair’s popular rue du Caire

  Those who tired of the delights (however dubious) of this faux little Egypt could experience France’s other colonial realms over in the second section of the fair, located on the Esplanade des Invalides, best reached by the specially installed toylike Decauville railroad. The diminutive train, which made a two-mile trip around the perimeter of the two fairgrounds, also quickly became popular: “A very wobbly, rock-a-bye little railway it is, with notices put up all over it and along its route, warning you in every known tongue not to put out your head, arms, or legs, and if you mind this injunction and hold on very firmly you don’t fall out. When you reach the Esplanade you wonder why you stayed so long on the Champ de Mars; for if anything this is more delightful. Arabs stalk majestically around in their white bournous, and permit you to inspect their tents. Chinamen with no shoes and a great deal of hat fly by bearing passengers in their pousse-pousses , and laughing as if it were rather good fun, not hard work at all.”

  On the Esplanade, “the Arabic, Moorish and Turkish manufactures draw crowds. Here men are making shoes; there a woman is weaving a blanket, drawing her thread back and forth painfully, without even a shuttle. In the Morocco pavilion dinner is being served, and two men, reclining on a carpet, dip their hands together into the dish.” Many French citizens saw for the first time some of the peoples of their new far-flung colonial empire. Fairgoers were lured by “the smell of Oriental spices and north African couscous, the sound of Senegalese tom-toms, Polynesian flutes and Annamite gongs, the sight of Moslem minarets and Cambodian temples. In the bazaars of the large Algerian and Tunisian pavilions craftsmen fashioned jewelry, finely tooled leather and brightly colored tapestries.” All the enchanting possibilities were overwhelming. One reporter contemplated a day in which he would “breakfast at Siam, dine in Bucharest, have his tea served by real Indians, and wind up with a Khedive cigarette at the Egyptian concert, where the dance girl Aicha does not seem to be distant, to say the least.”

  In early May Paul Gauguin arrived in Paris from Pont-Aven to help hang the Volpini show. He and his friends had lugged their white-framed paintings on handcarts through the exhibition grounds to Monsieur Volpini’s and carefully arranged the canvasses on its pomegranate-colored walls. In the end, Gauguin chose only one of his Martinique paintings and three Brittany pastels. During the few weeks he remained in the city, he spent late nights going round plastering buildings with advertising posters for the show: EXPOSITION DE PEINTURES AT THE EXPOSITION UNIVERSELLE.

  Vincent had written Theo to say, “I think you were right not to show any pictures of mine at the exhibition that Gauguin and the others had. My not yet being recovered is reason enough for my keeping out of it without giving them offense.

  “I think unquestionably Gauguin and [Émile] Bernard have great and real merit.

  “And it remains very understandable that for beings like them—young and very vigorous, who must live and try to hack out their way—it would be impossible to turn all their canvases to the wall until it should please people to admit them into something, into the official stew. You cause a stir by exhibiting in cafés; I do not say it is not bad taste to do it, but I myself have this crime on my conscience twice over, as I exhibited at the Tambourin and at the Avenue de Clichy.”

  Gauguin happily joined the crowds exploring the newly opened fair. Like everyone else, he had an opinion on the Eiffel Tower: “Of course this exhibition sees the triumph of iron, not only with regard to machines but also with regard to architecture. And yet architecture is at a new beginning in the sense that it lacks an artistic form of decoration consistent with the new material. . . . It’s up to the architect-engineers to come up with a new art of decoration, such as ornamental bolts, iron corners jutting beyond the main outline, a sort of gothic lacework of iron. To some extent this is what we find in the Eiffel Tower.”

  Still yearning to travel to the tropics, Gauguin was delighted to discover the next closest thing at the Esplanade: a bamboo-and-thatch Javanese kampong complete with a headman’s house on stilts, and cafés in little huts amid a grove of bamboo. Dutch businessmen promoting Van Houten cacao and Lucas Bols spirits had arranged for sixty-five Javanese to live there during the fair, including “a troupe of temple dancers, little girls aged from twelve to sixteen, dressed in exquisitely bejewelled costumes, performing temple dances whose movements mirror the Khmer figures on the temple next door,” a faithful life-size plaster replica of Angkor Wat in the new French colony of Cambodia.

  Gauguin was just one of many artists enthralled by these living versions of art they had only seen in reproductions. “You missed something in not coming the other day,” he wrote his friend Émile Bernard. “In the Javanese village there are Hindu dances. All the art of India can be seen in them, and they give you a literal transcription of the photographs I have from Cambodia. I’m going back on Thursday as I have an appointment with a mulatto girl. Come on Thursday, but I mustn’t be too late getting there. . . . I intend to leave next Tuesday and I must think about packing up my things.”

  Brownell of Scribner’s far preferred the serpentine Javanese dances performed to gamelan music to the belly dancing, describing how “all of artistic Paris” was in thrall to one particular Javanese dancer of fourteen or fifteen. “Her skin, of which a great deal was visible, was of the most beautiful golden hue, with citron shadows, and her arms were modelled with an extraordinary delicacy. Her face was decidedly of a moon-like character with eyes wide apart.” All over the fair, novel sensations, dramas, and amusements abounded.

  Javanese dancers

  CHAPTER SIX

  Buffalo Bill and Annie Oakley Triumphant

  On Saturday, May 18, le tout Paris streamed toward Buffalo Bill’s Wild West in the leafy precincts of the Parc de Neuilly. By two o’clock a distinguished crowd, including the former queen Isabella II of Spain, princes, counts, generals, politicians of high rank, and famous artists such as Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier had so overflowed the grandstands (capacity fifteen thousand) that there was standing room only. The entire American colony was patriotically present, wondering nervously what in the world the French would make of such a uniquely Yankee spectacle. Col. William F. Cody was staging this first invitation-only command performance in honor of Third Republic president Sadi Carnot. The Cowboy Band struck up a lively tune as U.S. Marines marched in with American minister Robert Lane, who then waited to welcome President and Madame Carnot and escort the couple to a loge box draped with the tricolor.

  With that, Wild West orator Frank Richmond strode into the huge arena, where a vast canvas backdrop of the rugged Rocky Mountains and lonesome pines evoked the American West. Richmond, whose voice had been likened to a steam calliope, gamely began to declaim “l’histoire de l’ouest sauvage de Buffalo Bill,” in a freshly memorized French version of the scripted narration. Up in the jammed stands, the French audience collectively furrowed its brow trying to discern what language this impressive man might be speaking. Richmond d
eclared in his rote-learned français that this frontier pageant was the real and true story of modern nineteenth-century American progress, the white man’s taming of the Wild West of buffalo and Indians. He then introduced “Le Grand Défilé de Toute la Troupe,” and Buck Taylor led in the scores of whooping cowboys, who thundered about on their horses doing rope tricks. Proceeding more solemnly, the one hundred Plains Indians presented a fearsome sight in brilliant war paint and feathered bonnets, with orator Richmond introducing each chief by name. The Mexican vaqueros in their silver-bedecked costumes and sombreros rode past, as did the cowgirls, followed by the French-Canadian trappers and their Eskimo sled dogs, and of course that famous star Miss Annie Oakley. “Last—but not by any means least,” reported the Paris Herald, “came Buffalo Bill, who rode in like the wind on his beautifully groomed gray mustang, and stopped in splendid fashion before the Presidential box to salute M. Carnot. The American flag carried round by an old Indian fighter elicited a hearty round of applause; then the show began.”

  Almost every American present knew precisely who Col. William F. Cody was: Buffalo Bill, legendary all-American western scout, King of the Border Men, Indian fighter, crack shot, buffalo hunter, and showman ex traordinaire. The French, however, were familiar only with the Wild West posters everywhere and the few newspaper stories, so they were fascinated but still somewhat mystified. In England, Richmond’s scripted narration had helpfully elucidated such Wild West show mainstays as the running of the legendary Pony Express, an Indian ambush of the Deadwood Stage, the buffalo hunt, the war between different Indian tribes, broncobusting, sharpshooting, and the grand finale, a stealthy Indian attack on a small pioneer cabin thwarted by none other than Buffalo Bill himself. But here in Neuilly, Richmond’s accent français was so fractured that few in the audience could fathom what he was declaiming when he made the opening introduction of “L’attaque d’un convoi de Trappeurs et de Pionniers par une tribu de peaux-Rouges.”